A few more years from now, people are going to ask about web pages from 2015: "why did everybody's blog have light grey text on a white background everywhere? They must have had excellent visual acuity back in 2015"
When i hear "the startup bubble of 2001", I always take a moment to imagine what was a startup in 2001. I imagine an HTML 2 page with no Javascript and an ad banner at the top, inlined styles and <blink> tags... Like Altavista or Yahoo.
There were different web design trends, from my subjective perspective:
* 1991-1995 the early web with all sort of experiments,
* 1995-2000 What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get era 8Frontpage/Dreamweaver/GoLive/etc) with Frames and Table-based layout and quite interesting design decisions, Java-applets, every website looked different often with very nice artworks and designs
* 2000-2005 no frames more CSS less graphical too much content on each page, Flash and various other embedded plugins, XML and XHTML 1 were hot
* 2005-2010 usage of AJAX, upcoming JSON
* 2010-today leaner design, less is more, inspired by the Google startpage and styled after recent operating system themes from iOS/Windows8/Android5, HTML5, JS5, CSS3, heavy usage of AJAX on some sites (one page apps), responsive design (work on different screen resolutions)
The web design was most colorful and interesting in the early days til about 2000. Then came the more boring years with cooperate designs and pages with too much content stuffed on one page. It got a lot more interesting from the design point of view though some of the flat-designs mean developer-art which isn't everyone likes.
Dynamic web apps in the first "bubble" era were generally either perl/cgi or ASP (without the .NET suffix, obviously). Javascript was used, but only for small things like required field validations. Databases would be SQL Server or Oracle or Sybase, typically. PHP and MySQL was also used. Servers were mostly either Sun or Microsoft (for ASP), though there was some Linux.
The main difference from today was that almost all dynamic content was generated server-side (of course we do still see that today also, but it's not "trendy"). Layouts were table-based and yes, styles were almost always in-line and not in separate stylesheets. Very little JavaScript, because it was common for browsers to not support it, there were significant quirky differences between browsers, and the CPU speeds of the day meant you couldn't do anything substantial with it anyway. If it was used, it was again typically in-line in an "onblur" or "onsubmit" handler.
Security of web apps at the time was laughable by today's standards. SSL had a significant impact on server performance and was mostly limited to use on the login page, if it was used at all. SQL injection was only beginning to be understood by most developers, many (most?) sites used SQL queries made with unescaped concatenated strings and were vulnerable.
If they were really on board with Microsoft technologies, they might have abstracted their logic into business objects likely written in VB6, running in a COM layer in Microsoft Transaction Server, which called stored procedures in SQL Server. Or they might have used Java and JSP and servlets
Almost nobody had broadband unless they worked at a university or tech company. Dial-up was the norm elsewhere so page assets had to be pretty minimal. Many people had screens that were 640x480 so most websites designed for that.
I still see a lot of code in languages like PHP that is quite similar to what was being written in 2000.
I worked at a startup in 1997/1998 to write a turn-key intranet application for bioinformatics search and analysis services. It had interfaces for people and for machines. It wasn't internet based because it dealt with potentially proprietary data, which customers didn't want out on the public network.
It was a bunch of CGI scripts in Perl behind httpd, and some command-line executables. I rolled my own template language for it ("mhtml" for "macro html"). We had never heard of using a database for the web, and so it tracked no user information outside of simple logging. It used a couple of lines of Javascript - my first in shipping code - but no CSS. I didn't use CSS until 2000.
I still see a lot of web pages like that among computer science academics, especially those who are of "pre-internet" generations. E.g http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/
Because a pattern like that looks quite alright with a contemporary 800x600 resolution 15" CRT monitor, probably a lot more pleasant than black text on plain white background.
Nope, I was bitching about those *I#$@! backgrounds way back then. It was part fashion and part narcissism: "Look ma, what I can do. I'm a real programmer!"
